Web Services and Tools

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Every once in a while, we stumble on those less desirable people that lurk on the Internet looking for new ways to take advantage of the system. Today, we would like to offer a warning to our users about one such dishonest group of people that call themselves, www.webdesignvalidation.com.

They offer you to submit you contact details and your web site information for a chance to win a new design for your site. We entered one of our sites into their contest at the beginning of the year with the chance to win a newly designed web site using Web 2.0 technologies. We thought, “Hey that’s a good idea. Let’s see how good they are so we can recommend this to our readers”.

So we complied with their rules. We put up a badge on our web site that let’s people click through to their site and vote for our site. Pretty simple … or so we thought.

They sent us a notice that on the 19th, our submitted site had been approved for submission as a “Non-Web 2.0 site”. Good news! On the 20th, they notified us that they were offering more rewards for their users. And a small note that said “a 3-plan membership was added in order to create a profile”. We weren’t sure what that meant. Nothing ever stated in the rules about a membership but we had already joined and been approved so we mistakenly assumed we were already members. But nothing was said about changes to the rules since we had joined.

On the 21st, another email about 3 new rewards. They were the same rewards as mentioned the day before. There was another mention of membership but again it was not obvious. “We have updated our awards for your category and added 3 membership options”. Ok, so what. Are we supposed to do something? No call to action in the email … no reference to rules changes for those already entered in January’s contest. We’re good to go.

But, out of caution, we decided to logon to the site and see how our submitted site was fairing in the ratings. Good news again, our submitted site was in first place with plenty of margin over the second place person. No worries then.

On January 31, we heard from one of our loyal fans that the badge on the homepage of our site was taking them to an error page (Error 404, page not found). We thought that was odd so we checked it out. Sure enough, no voting page. So we went to the home page at WDV and there was a notice that their system was down for scheduled maintenance and would be back online on February 1. Ok, we can wait.

On Feb 1 we received this little gem in our email exactly as quoted:

Wait a minute … we already have a user account. And to prove it they have addressed us as “Dear Member”. Now they are telling us that they have upgraded the site and we have to create an account again. What happened to our old account? What happened to our first place rating?

So we checked …. no account, no first place rating, all of the old pages resulted in “Page not found” errors. We sent an email asking what was going on. The following email was received the same day (copied exactly with spelling errors included):

Obviously, we did not hesitate to contact them.

It is amazing the methods that some people will use in order to build a contact list. While we did not loose any money on this, we do apologize as we did ask some of you to cast your vote for the site we submitted to understand how this was going to work. But we were most put out by the fact that they promised something to the web community, and then changed the rules to seemingly avoid delivering on the promise.

If this is how they treat their members, I am certainly not going to give them money as a registered member to be treated this badly. Obviously not a lot of gray matter exists in the heads of the people over at WDV.

We want to offer our sincere appreciation for your effort and we apologize for this inconvenience. Now we know that the people at WDV are not desirable business partners. We warn our customers not to use their service.

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Editor’s note: This article isn’t really about a Web Service or Tool, but deals with one of the more human aspects of trying to start your own online business.

These days, it is so easy to get down about your own personal situation. With so many of us out of work, or worried about losing our current jobs, on top of the day to day challenges we all face, it is easy to give into that nagging negativity signal in our heads.

We all know that simply repeating to ourselves the phrase “I’m going to be positive and have a good attitude” just doesn’t quite remove the negativity. Sometimes the motivational posters or that great quote posted up next to your computer may help, but they don’t keep you motivated. You have to work at staying positive and motivated every day. It’s not easy. You have to take deliberate action to have a positive attitude. You can’t just think about being positive, you have to act!

7 Methods to Keeping a Positive Attitude:

1. Misery Loves Company

As most of us have trouble keeping a positive attitude, one of the biggest mistakes we all make at times is sharing our troubles with others in a similar situation. Before long, the conversation turns in to story after story of negativity. If you find yourself involved in one of these “pity parties”, politely excuse yourself. These sessions are a waste of time and energy and are not at all productive. Avoid misery.

2. Poison People

Another type of person to be avoided is the person that tells you how all of your ideas are horse hockey. These people are usually negative most of the time and quick to complain about the slightest thing. You can not remove these people from your life, as much as you would like to, but they should be avoided or taken in small doses. Especially at times when your positive attitude meter is running low.

3. Spending Time with Friends, Family

When I am feeling a bit negative, the best medicine for me is to spend some time with my kids. You may not have children, so spending some time with a family member or a good friend, who is prone to being positive, is beneficial. If you are not near a family member or friend, go to the park or simply get out and go for a walk and watch other people. Getting your mind off of yourself and onto someone else is great for generating a more positive attitude. It doesn’t necessarily solve your immediate problems, but it puts you in a more positive state of mind for tackling your issues in a more productive manner.

4. Read something that Motivates you

There are plenty of motivational books out there these days. For some of us, we may just have a good story that motivates us in a similar way. Take a few minutes or an hour out to immerse yourself in a book that motivates you and puts you in a more positive state of mind.

5. Learn something new, Become an Expert

Find a topic that you have always been interested in and learn about it. Get onto Google, search for a few terms, go to those web pages, learn about it and become an expert on it. The effort will give you a great feeling of accomplishment, generating a more positive attitude and motivating you to continue towards your goals.

6. Exercise

Get out of the house (or office). Go for a walk. Go to the gym. Just get some exercise and sweat a little bit. Burn off the excess energy that is feeding your negative attitude. Personally, this has always helped me to become more positive.

7. Reward yourself

These days, getting praise for a job well done is almost non-existent. So go on, you did a great job. Go get something nice for yourself. Not food, a beer or a bottle of whiskey, but a tangible item that you can set on your desk or computer that reminds you that “you are doing a good job”.

Summary

I hope this information helps those that read it. We all go through periods of negativity that can really damage any progress we have made so far. Book mark this page and save it for later. If things really get tough, leave me a comment … always glad to help.

Personal note: My method for motivating myself was to write this blog post. Not only is this helping me to gain a more positive attitude, it is motivating me to do a few new things I have not yet thought of before.

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Finding a tool that let’s you polish up your photos for the web is not an easy task. Some photo editing tools are so feature packed, they become a little too difficult to use for the average computer user. So we went searching for online photo editing tools to see what was available and we’ve found three products that we think meet the needs of most.

The tools are Picnik, Splashup and Snipshot. All three allow you to upload a photo from your computer or from the Internet. Both Picnik and Snipshot also have a Premium upgrade that gives you far more photo enhancing effects to choose from than just the standard freebie package. Here is our brief take on each of the tools.

Picnik

Registration for a free account was extremely easy and didn’t take you through the email validation process that is common today. There are more photo effects available to the free user than with Snipshot, and the premium upgrade is the least expensive of the tools at $24.95 for one year, or about $2 per month.

Splashup

This was our favorite because it opened up a familiar application window when we were ready to get started with our photo editing. Registration was very simple with no email verification. And all of the effects are available with your free registration, but there are not as many effects as Picnik offers to premium subscribers. There was no Premium membership option available for this tool.

Snipshot

There was no registration required for us to upload a photo and add some effects. However, the effects available to the free user are very limited. The good news is the premium membership is the most expensive at $9 per month, the good news being that you only needed to buy a month premium membership at a time instead of a full year.

We recommend you to try out all three and make the choice for yourself.

Happy photo editing!

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If you are just starting out in your online business venture, or you have been running your own site for a while, Google Webmaster Tools should be the one tool that you have in your arsenal of website analytics tools.

This website tool will let you analyze all of your web sites and help you to understand how Google sees your site as it exists today. Based on the information here, you can fine tune your web site to present it in the manner you desire.

To get started, you should visit the site and add one of your web sites to the list. You will then need to verify that you are the site owner. This verification is done in one of two ways; adding a specially named file to the root directory of your web site, or adding a meta tag into the HEAD section of your home page. If you have your own domain name, either option is easy. If you are running a blog on a site like Blogger, Wordpress or Typepad, you will need to edit the template file that contains your HEAD tag information. In Wordpress this is done by going into the dashboard for your blog, clicking ‘Presentation’, ‘Theme editor’, and editing the ‘header.php’ file. Just find the line that says BODY and insert the tag Google gives you just above this line.

Now you’re ready. When you visit the Webmaster Tools site again, you are greeted with the Dashboard. From here you can add and delete sites, manage site maps, and click through to more detailed reports about how your site is indexed. Once you select the site that you want more detail on, you are given a number of options to choose from; Diagnostics, Statistic, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

The Diagnostics are will tell you what problems Google encountered while crawling your website. These problems could include HTTP errors, pages that weren’t found or restricted, or just simply URLs that could not be reached. If you have pages optimized for mobile devices, you can view any issues with those pages as well. Google has recently added a Content Analysis option to his page as well to identify any issues they found with Page Titles or Meta descriptions or non-indexable content. Who says Google doesn’t care about Meta data?

In the Statistics area, Google will show you when your site was included in the search results, terms that returned your site and the position your site placed in that particular search on average. This is very valuable for determining what keywords your site is linked associated with.

This area will also show you Google’s take on your site. This is probably the most powerful part of the tool. You can see what words are used in links back to your site, the keywords Google has identified on your site, and the list of keywords on other sites that link to you. This is all very important to determining your Google Page Rank. You can see what your Google Page Rank is from the Crawl Stats link under Statistics. This will not be a number, but will be a subjective result based on Google Analysis.

Statistics will also show you your indexing stats link the pages indexed, names of sites that link to you, the cached page of your site, etc.

The Links area is pretty cool because it will show you a list of your web pages that other web sites have linked to. From there, you can drill down and see the exact URL of the pages that link to that page. You can also see how the internal page linking for your website is understood by Google.

In the Sitemaps area, you can manage and submit a sitemap for each of your web sites. This really helps Google in indexing your site, but is not a requirement. You can generate a Google Sitemap from the XML Sitemaps web site automatically, and then upload the files to your server. This might not be possible for bloggers use free blogging tools, but the Sitemaps tool is only an option and not a requirement for using Webmaster Tools.

The last area is the Tools section. Here, there are various tools that Google provides to help analyze the different aspects of your web site that are important to a crawler like the robots.txt file, your preferred domain reference, the geographic target of your web site, and more.

Each of tools and sections described come with online help and very clear descriptions of what each tool is doing and how to use it. The tools are easy to use and will help you learn a lot about how Google sees your web site and what you can do to help it place better in the search results.

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We’ve just run across this wonderful new tool from COLOURlovers.

Getting the perfect color or color scheme for your web site, or graphic can be difficult. The most difficult part is remembering those cryptic hex codes or RGB codes for your favorite color.

So the folks at COLOURlovers created a color picker tool. But the best part is this tool is free, and they’re making the code available to put on your website.

As we are always scouring the web looking for useful Web Tools for our visitors, we will be putting this on our site. But we thought we should let our visitors know they have the option to get a hold of this tool as well to benefit their web design efforts.

You can get the code here.

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On-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of placing your selected keywords in the right places on your web pages. It also involves optimizing your website’s page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve search engine rankings.

In this post, we’ll take a look at each of these areas and how you can optimize these areas to help position your web site higher in search engine rankings.

Page Title Attributes

The attributes that we will examine in this section are the main title of your web page (the text displayed at the very top of the browser window), the description and the meta keywords. These attributes are set in the <HEAD> section of each web page in the following tags:

<title>Your Web Page Title</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your web site description”>
<meta name=keywords” content=”Your selected keywords”>

Although these are not that important to the Google search bots, they do help other web search engines and directories determine the value of your content. If these other search engines and directories value your content, this will also help boost your Google page rankings.

The Title is the most important attribute there is for two reasons. First, the title is the one piece of information that describes what the page is about. It is the default title your browser and book-marking sites will automatically use when people save your site for future use. Second, it is what search engines use to determine what your website is all about. Compared to everything else on your page, the title gets the most weight from the search engines.

The description is an abstract or a summary of your web page. It is crucial that the important words and terms about your site be crafted into the description. Another use of the description is that currently Yahoo! (and possibly other engines) use this description when your site is returned on a given search term, and it has to show a small summary of your site below the title.

The meta-keywords provide a set of key terms or words that describe your web page. Originally, the keywords element was a key element towards determining the context of a web page. It was a quick way for the search engine to understand what a web page was about. But, as people started abusing this feature by stuffing words into the meta-keywords element that had nothing to do with the web page’s content, the importance of the meta-keywords element has been greatly reduced. Although this information is still a contributing factor, search engines no longer look at this information as the definitive way to understand web page context.

Headings

Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use heading tags ( <h1>, <h2>, etc.) in their HTML. These tags not only help human readers segment the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a web page and determine what is most important. It is generally a good idea to use heading tags to help the search engines understand what the web page is about.The Item in the <h1> tag is usually the headline of the Web Page. The lower ranked headings ( <h2, <h3> and so on …) are used in the same manner as you might identify outline levels of a document. For instance, the title of this post is a <h3> tag while the sub-titles, like the one at the top of this section on headings, is a <h4>.

Identifying Images

Images are a great way to enhance a website from the visitor’s perspective. But search engine crawlers cannot see these images, even though they understand that an image exists because of the HTML tag in which it is contained. If you have lots of images on your website that contain textual content within the image itself, this text will not be seen by the crawlers.

HTML helps address this issue by allowing you to specify the textual content for an image using the “alt” attribute within the <img> tag. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign specific text as the “alternative” content for images for visitors or web crawlers that cannot view the images. This alt attribute also adds weight to determining the content on your web pages.

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Well, here is a lesson in Search Engine Optimization and keyword selection at its absolute best.

Before today, a Google search for the term “died in a blogging accident” would have returned a grand total of 2 results. However, thanks to the website xkcd, the term now fetches more than 3,000 results (as of this writing).

It is now known if the writer intended for this to happen, but this is an excellent lesson in how the proper content matched with a particular term can rocket your web site to the number one position for a given search term.

Now, I have never personally had a need to search for this term on Google, and hopefully I never will. But what intrigues me about this particular search term is that, at one point during the last 12 hours, this term returned more than 7,000 results.

Perhaps Google’s algorithm can determine the difference between spam posts on a popular term and the quality posts.

This event can certainly help you to gain an understanding of search terms and how they effect the overall scheme of things. You may want to continue to watch this term for a few days.

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If you’re like most Internet Marketers, you have a library of domain names that you use to promote your various products on the Web. Some of these ventures work well, while others don’t produce much revenue or traffic at all.

When the later happens, what do you do with those well thought out domain names that are no longer generating money? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to make money from those domain names? You could sell the domain name … but that takes time and isn’t always guaranteed to generate any revenue?

Well there is an answer to all of these question in a product called “Cash Parking“. This allows you to point your unused or dormant domain name to a cash parking server where any visitors can view relevant ads for the domain name. They also have the option to buy the domain name directly from the front page. And the best part … You, the domain owner, get a portion of the revenues for any and all advertisements clicked. And of course you would get the agreed amount when the domain is purchased. It also easier to sell a domain name that is generating revenue that it is to sell one that isn’t.

Where can you get cash parking? It’s not a stand alone service, but the service is offered to those that use the domain registration service here. You can simply transfer domain names owned by you and the service will become available as an option.

There are many other domain options available to the Internet Marketer to help turn those dead domains into revenue generating machines.

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I can’t tell you how many times I have been designing a web site and come to a point where I say to myself, “I wish I had a really cool looking button for this section.”

So I start up Adobe Photoshop, of which my skills are somewhat lacking, and I attempt to create a stunning button. Hours later, I have a so-so graphic that looks like something a 3 year old drew with a crayon. Not my desired result and a major waste of time.

So I was very pleased to run across this fantastic online tool for creating very cool looking buttons. It takes very little effort on my part, but looks like I know my stuff when it comes to creating graphics.

In four easy steps, you too can have a Web 2.0 button that looks as stunning as the one shown here.

Step 1 - Select the size of your button with the handy slider bar

Step 2 - Select a color for your button

Step 3 - Optionally use a predefined, or uploaded, icon in the button and size it

Step 4 - Select your Text, font style, size and color

Click ‘Apply’ and there you have your newly created, stunning looking Web 2.0 button. Don’t like it? Then revisit any step and click ‘Apply’ again. When you like what you see, just download it to your computer by clicking the ‘Download’ button.

What could be easier? And better yet, what else can make me look like the web design professional I wish I was?

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Happy New Year!

A report was released a few months ago which I thought was of interest in relationship to the top 20 blogging sites on Technorati. Some interesting findings include that “out of the top 20 bloggers, 40% are missing a 301 redirects, 65% are missing description metadata, and 80% are missing keywords metadata“.

The report, put together using HubSpot’s Website Grader Tool, shows that many of the most professional and top ranked sites are missing key elements in their pages to help them place high in the search engine rankings.

This is actually good news for the average blogger proving that, as long as you have content that everybody wants to read, and you haven’t missed out on some the key elements of SEO, you still have a chance of beating out the popular blogs in the search engines.

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